The key point of the article appears at the end of the second paragraph, and pretty much explains everything that follows:<p>>...I simply can’t discern features of the field itself that have been put in place to perpetuate inequities.<p>If you don't understand how systemic inequity can persist without overt bigotry, then any kind of affirmative action is going to seem counterproductive to you. But bias is self-reinforcing; once it happens for any significant amount of time, it persists even among people with no conscious bias. If you don't actually see a minority doing a job, it becomes slightly more difficult to imagine them doing that job, and that small difference, aggregated across millions of people, adds up to a significant ongoing effect. Add in the economic consequences, and you have a further reinforcement. It's like a traffic jam that persists long after the accident that caused it is cleared. And of course, that assumes that there is no longer any conscious bigotry and clearly there is: there are still organized groups in the US publicly advocating white supremacy, for instance.
What's funny that women are <i>already</i> a majority of STEMM undergraduates (in addition to being a majority of undergraduates overall).<p>Which leads to organizations contorting themselves to define STEMM in some way that excludes all the female dominated majors: biology, nursing, psychology, social science...<p>They can't admit that women are already winning at education, so they have to keep drilling down to find sub-sub groups where they're a minority.
Somewhat poorly written article about a poorly defined political plan which is generating many poor responses here on hacker news.<p>This is three layers of not very constructive all piled on top of each other.
"Hmm, maybe HN will have a thoughtful comment section for an article like this rather than the radioactive one I'd expect on Twitter or Reddit"<p>[...scrolls down...]<p>"Oh no"
There are no fed scholarships or special funding for stem students. You get the same for degrees that have no market. Many of these people could not do much with stem in school because of their living situation/school being poorly operated.<p>If we want stem, we have to pay for it. The fed does not do this. They won't even fund student programs. All of that money goes into luxurious bio/chem labs used for overwhelmingly useless research. It turns out that none of this is about student education, it's for furthering the careers of "researchers".
Colleges are looking for a more diverse faculty but cant keep them as they leave frustrated with the same old system that kept them out before. You cant just fix one piece and expect everything to resolve. Education is a stubborn profession and discrimination is a hard problem.